Ocarina Originators
Barry “Baz” Jennings’s website for the four-hole ocarina he and John Taylor originated, the two addresses it ran at, and how it came to be preserved here.
A note from the museum
This page is the museum’s account of a website it has preserved material from. It is not by the people who made that site.
Ocarina Originators was Barry “Baz” Jennings and John Taylor. Taylor made the first English-style four-hole ocarina in 1964, proportionally tuned so that four holes of graduated size give a full octave; Jennings developed it alongside him. Between them they changed what a small ocarina could do, and the system is still the one most players in Britain learn first.
The website is a narrower thing than the partnership, and the museum records it as Jennings’s. Both addresses were his — ocarina.demon.co.uk was a personal account with a British internet provider, and ocarinamasters.org came later — and it was Jennings who asked, before he died, that the site be kept alive. Its footer read “Copyright Ocarina Originators 1997 and 2001”, later 2003, which is the partnership’s name and not evidence of who built the pages. Whether Taylor wrote any part of it is not established. What is certain is that the site was about the work of both men.
Baz died on August 28, 2004, aged 64, in a London hospice. John Taylor died on February 20, 2011 — news the ocarina world had from Sandi and Richard Schmidt of Clayzeness, who announced it to the Ocarina Making group that March. The same pair had mirrored Baz’s site at his request.
What the museum has preserved
- A History of the Ocarina — their account of the instrument from the Xun to the English four-hole, and a biography of Giuseppe Donati. The most complete copy of it known to survive.
Held privately, unpublished: the whole of both sites as the Internet Archive recorded them, Alan Albright’s memoir “Dance to the Music of the Ocarina, Wilhemina” as it originally ran across six pages, and his 1995 curriculum vitae.
Three separate holdings sit behind this page, and the Preserved Websites table lists them separately because they are separate things.
ocarina.demon.co.uk
The original site, running from about 1997 — captured between 1998 and 2021 across about 430 days:
102 files, 293.6 KB.
| 92 | pages |
| 8 | photographs and illustrations |
| 2 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
ocarinamasters.org
Jennings’s second address, titled “Welcome to Ocarina Originators” and carrying much of the same material — captured between 2003 and 2012 across about 235 days:
297 files, 1.2 MB — and 287 further captures of those same pages, taken on other dates, 1.1 MB more. So this is a record of how the site changed, not a single day of it.
| 269 | pages |
| 15 | photographs and illustrations |
| 12 | small images that are page furniture rather than pictures — buttons, rules, spacers |
It has not been read through. It is held because it is his, and because a second copy of a site whose first copy is an orphan work is worth having; what is in it that is not also in the first site is an open question, and this page will say so until somebody has answered it.
A memorial page for John Taylor
A short page someone put up after Taylor died on February 20, 2011:
4 files, 35.7 KB.
| 2 | pages |
Who made it is not known, which is why it is listed under its own name rather than anybody’s: it is not part of either of Jennings’s sites, and Jennings had been dead seven years when Taylor died. The museum holds it and publishes nothing from it.
All three sit among the sites the museum has copied.
Why the history is published, and on what basis
Their own terms reserved all rights and asked that nothing be copied without written permission. That permission can no longer be given by anyone. Baz left no children and no brother; no heir has been found. The work is in copyright until roughly 2074 and no license for it can be obtained — the UK orphan-works scheme authorises use within the UK only, and the United States has no scheme at all.
Set against that: before he died, Baz asked that the site be kept alive. Richard Schmidt of Clayzeness took it on and mirrored it; a second copy was kept at pollardhosting.com. Richard died on November 29, 2013, clayz.com has since lapsed, and the pollardhosting copy has vanished without trace. Two of the three custodial copies are already gone.
So the museum publishes the history, states the position on the page itself, makes no commercial use of it, names its authors, and will take it down at once should anyone entitled to ask ever wish it. That is a judgement rather than a procedure, and it is set out in full in the museum’s policies.
The rest of it
The history is one page of a large site. Most of what Baz and John made — the teaching materials, the music, the masterclasses, the link pages that mapped the ocarina web of the late 1990s — is preserved here and not published, because no argument has been made for publishing it and none of it is at risk in the way the history was.